At the onset of the cataclysm, I noticed two things. Firstly, the trickles of coffee leaching from the sealed lid of my mug. The second was an alien sense of weightlessness, as if my body disconnected ever so slightly from the ground. Before I could process either of these the universe abruptly flipped a switch within the very laws of physics, and flung all of humanity toward the skies. My frame falls faster than the guts within them, all landing with a sickening crunch against the lowest ceiling. Sharp pain singes my core. Gravity's new vector pelts the surface with bodies and desks and debris, driving the entire building around me to groan in structural agony. As I'm dragged ever upwards I interrogate years of memory to recall just how many levels of ceiling the foyer is comprised of; the number and placement of the skylights dotted along them; how many levels separate me from the highest ceiling, a bare sheet of glass. Instinct takes over the conscious and digs my fingers into the surface below in attempt to halt my momentum. The fall is hazy in my recollection, but I suppose that's the small price I pay for my life. Every person in that lobby fell to their own fate. Some landed on the lower levels, now above me, and managed to stop. Two hit the very bottom along with a bench, sending cracks trickling through the glass floor below them. It grants a pristine view to observe the unfortunate others who crashed straight through the skylights. Their flailing limbs do nothing to slow the fall into the great blue void. Inhale. Exhale. Breathe. Focus. My brain slowly catches up with my body, attempts to process the horrific scene unfolding around me. Above is a maze of asphalt and dirt, bathed in beaming sunlight from the yawning pit below. Entire buildings are ripped from their foundations, leaving tortuous webs of steel to grasp at their crumbling waterfalls of concrete. Trees are ripped out of the soil, veins of cars and buses flung into the azure abyss. The entire visible surface is sundered a boneyard, littered with the skeletons of an entire city. All this wrought in mere seconds by a force our science cannot explain. Many of us retch, be it from pure disbelief or the violent disagreement between our inner ears and our eyes. Still readjusting we all stagger aimlessly atop our new ground, too stricken by fear to move, yet apprehensive to remain in place. The sole thought reverberating through my skull regards the fate of those that crashed through the skylights. What is it like? To barrel into the sky, looking straight above you to watch helplessly as the layers of buildings and mountains and meadows congeal into a flat plane, for it all shrink ever smaller until you eventually black out from lack of oxygen. For a second time I throw up. This one tastes solely of bile. Following the cataclysm's birth, I counted seventeen of us alive. Three above managed to construct a path to the elevator shaft, through which they attempted to navigate to the lower offices in search of food. We've not heard from them since. By nightfall a fourth experienced a nervous breakdown, trapped in that pit of cracked glass at the very bottom, and in a fit of anxiety took the poor fifth with him. Twelve of us remain. At this point I refuse to gaze down into the harrowing maw that wraps its jaws around the earth. Yet something in my brain keeps pulling my eyes downward. To think we once looked up to the stars in innocent awe, and always daydreamed of what wonders surely lie beyond... We all huddle against the walls, clinging to any perceived notion of structural solidity. We'll make through the night, in all likelihood, but beyond that none of us know our fate. Already we've run out of our meager scraps of food, and we can't exactly venture out from the building to search elsewhere. If the gaping abyss doesn't take us, the cage dangling over it certainly will.